Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Shop Talk Her Way is where former shop owner and coach JeanAnn Saint Grace opens up the books on what it really takes to run a profitable, sustainable, and well-balanced auto repair business.
With decades of experience in bookkeeping, operations, and leadership, JeanAnn brings an honest, no-fluff approach to shop management — all from a woman’s perspective. From financial systems and staffing to communication and culture, she shares insights that help shop owners (and especially women in the industry) take control, build better businesses, and enjoy the ride.
Whether you’re turning wrenches, balancing the books, or scaling to your next location, you’ll find encouragement, strategy, and a healthy dose of “you’ve got this” in every episode.
Shop Talk Her Way is an AutoFix Auto Shop Coaching production — helping shops thrive, her way.
Thanks to WorldPac and the WorldPac Training Institute (WTI) for sponsoring Shop Talk Her Way. Visit worldpac.com for the latest in auto parts distribution and wtitraining.com to explore training programs that can take your career to the next level.
[00:00:00] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So there's all these building blocks to get you to the shop that you want. And if you wanna do high ARO or high car count, low ARO, go for it. Like, I'm not taking that away from you, but make sure you're not driving your team so hard that they fall over, right? Um, you know, I'm a horse person, so you've, you've seen horses break down is what they call it.
[00:00:24] JeanAnn SaintGrace: You get horses in a race and they're good in a quarter mile, but they're not good at a half a mile or, or longer races. If over time you need your team to be resilient, healthy, ready to go to work, not overtaxed, not burnout, then looking at lowering your car count and driving your average repair order up is key to all of that
[00:00:51] JeanAnn SaintGrace: Are you running so many cars through your shop that it feels like a circus? My question for you today is how are you managing your car count and why car count can be a key component, but it's also how you manage those cars that makes the difference. Hi, this is JeanAnn SaintGrace with Shop Talk Her Way, and on this episode, I'm going to focus on car count and average pair order.
[00:01:15] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So last episode, we talked about productivity, which is so important, you know, to have a realistic, uh, productivity, um, expectation of your techs and your team members. And those numbers, what, what you need for productivity is based on your tech load, your, um, cost of wages tech load, your, um, average, not average repair order, your labor rate and, um, your, your work mix and your workflow.
[00:01:48] JeanAnn SaintGrace: But when we talk about car count and we talk about average repair order, these are the secret sauce to sales. And I am not gonna lie, early on in our shop, um, we had, when we first started, we had two techs, a service advisor, and then I was basically a CSR. Like I was checking people in and out, answering phones, directing traffic, that kind of thing.
[00:02:12] JeanAnn SaintGrace: And this was back in 2000, so 25 years ago, but we were running a high car count, low average ticket model. And I didn't know that, but that's in effect what we were doing. We were scheduling about six standalone oil changes every day, waders, and then we were in California, so we were doing smogs and we were doing between eight and 10 smogs a day.
[00:02:36] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So if you just count oil changes and smogs, our car count would have been about 18 plus whatever breakdowns, whatever diags we had. So we were processing somewhere between 20 to 22 cars a day on average, you know, if, if everything was moving right. And, and we were full and we were busy and we were running our buns off, like no lie.
[00:03:00] JeanAnn SaintGrace: It was chaos. And when people say there's no time, that's when there's no time. There's no time to spend with the customer because about the time that you're pulling the first wader out, the next wader is there. And so- Getting them in and out in a feasible amount of time, being able to spend quality time with them, that wasn't available.
[00:03:24] JeanAnn SaintGrace: And then you mix in your smogs, and it was just check in, check out, check in, check out. It was order taking. It was McDonald's. And when we got into coaching and realized we needed to drive our average repair order up, lower our count, car count, then we could drive our customer service level. Because when you start to decrease your, your car count, then you can really spend the time with your, with your customers that you need to spend.
[00:03:58] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So that's the first component of that. Lower car count means more time per customer with them, more time to explain things, more time to answer the phone and explain things over the phone. If you have somebody calling in looking for a diag or looking for some kind of work, then you've got the time to spend with them.
[00:04:17] JeanAnn SaintGrace: Then you can really slow down and breathe and, and up your level of customer service because you have time. And then if we're lowering our car count and we add in a DBI, then we've got the time to do a good quality DBI, 10, 15, 20 minutes per vehicle, depending on how in-depth your DBI is. And then your advisors have time to build estimates, and then they have time to present those when the service is complete.
[00:04:50] JeanAnn SaintGrace: And, and if you've got vehicles that are being dropped off, then you've got time to grow those repair orders into bigger ARO And mind you, when I talk about numbers like this, it's numbery, right? But it's also starts to sound like a cash register, and I never wanna take out the concept that we are here to serve the customer.
[00:05:16] JeanAnn SaintGrace: We serve the customer better when we have more time to spend with them. So I started off with customer service, and I want that theme to underlie everything I say about numbers, because I never wanna take that customer service level out of the component, but it sounds like when we start talking numbers, that that's all we're thinking about, and it's not.
[00:05:34] JeanAnn SaintGrace: There's a balance. So again, if we lower our average, our car count every day, then we have more time, our quality of, of care improves, our quality of work improves, our ability to fix cars the same day as long as parts are available improves. So instead of doing an oil change today and saying, "Oh, you, your brakes are metal to metal, and you can't drive it, and I'm booked till Friday," and it's Tuesday, now we've got time with a lower car count model to bring that, that, that brake job in and get it done that day.
[00:06:09] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So it becomes less dependent on volume of cars and more reliant on the ability to help customers right then rather than having to exit schedule them and do it on another day. So, so this, this, this changed our life, right? Because if you think about the difference between spending time, the amount of time you can spend with 22 people versus the time you can spend with six to 10, that's a whole different level of customer service And it's a whole different stress level on your team, especially your advisors, because every, every interaction with people requires them to reset, requires them to gauge that person's energy, requires them to reevaluate where they're at.
[00:07:04] JeanAnn SaintGrace: There's a ton of decisions that have to be made every day as an advisor. Where are we getting parts? When can we schedule this? How are we gonna, uh, rearrange the deck chairs to make all this stuff get done by the end of the day? And decision fatigue is a real thing. So by the end of the day, when they can't tell you if they want green or blue or burgers and fries or whatever it is, you know, they're in, they're in a decision fatigue state.
[00:07:30] JeanAnn SaintGrace: And I never... I didn't know there was a things as f- decision fatigue until very late in my shop owner career, but it showed up in things like, you know, my husband and I would get in the truck at the end of the day and be like, "Well, what's for dinner?" And I- it was literally like, "I don't care. I'll eat cereal.
[00:07:49] JeanAnn SaintGrace: I just can't make one more decision." And I didn't realize it was related to the number of people I had dealt with, the number of decisions that I had made, all of those things that go into being a service advisor, and I was just toast at the end of the day. So that, that is... it seems like a silly thing to be worried about, but if you're at the end of the day and you're trying to find the best part, the fi- best this, the best that, parts availability, reschedule, do these things, you can see how that cloud of decision-making can really mess up your day or...
[00:08:24] JeanAnn SaintGrace: and, and be depleted by the end of the day. So if we, again, can lower car count, give better quality service, fewer decisions to be made, then our customer service experience throughout the day is gonna stabilize. It's not gonna be at the end of the day, "Just get it out of here 'cause I don't care anymore. I need a reset."
[00:08:45] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So there's another benefit is the decision fatigue on your team. But this is also about pace, right? This is about balance in life, and if life is not so chaotic at work, then life is not so chaotic at home. So this also helps work-life balance. Now, where do we get into the numbers? Okay. So if in... And I'm gonna use a small model because you can scale the model as we move it out.
[00:09:13] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So my base model is two techs and one service advisor, and I'm sorry I have notes 'cause I can't do math without my adding machine, and if I-- I can't run my machine while I'm talking. So we have a goal for two c- two techs and one service advisor to do $20,000 in a week. That's five cars per day, that's $4,000 in sales, that's a $20,000 week.
[00:09:40] JeanAnn SaintGrace: Now, in order to have this, we have to start with an, uh, a, um, labor rate somewhere in the 150s. The higher your labor rate gets, the lower the hours per ticket go and the increase-- the sales stabilize. So 150 is an average, and so we've got a... I had to start somewhere, right? But you can imagine if your, um, labor rate goes up, then the number of hours you need to sell per car goes down and your average repair order goes up.
[00:10:13] JeanAnn SaintGrace: But if you have a lower labor rate, then you've-- you're squeezing those dollars and you have to sell more hours. So it's a teeter-totter effect. Um, but if we take an average of $150 per hour, if we have a three-hour average ticket, three hours per ticket on average, and a 50/50 parts to labor sales, that's a $900 ticket If we go to three and a half hours per ticket, that puts us at 1,050.
[00:10:47] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So 1,050 per ticket. And, and so you can kind of see how the numbers flow together. So if we just take $150 an hour, three and a half hours per ticket, a 50/50 parts and labor match, so that means if we're spending, um, 550, no, 525 in labor, then we're gonna sell 525 in parts plus job supplies. Now, for New York and California, I apologize, you're gonna have to make that difference up somewhere, um, that you're, you need to...
[00:11:21] JeanAnn SaintGrace: This is total aside. My people in New York and California, I used to be in California when I worked in my shop, so I understand the challenge of this. So New Yorkers, I feel you too. Um, finding a way to account for all those little parts and pieces that you really need to itemize. For shops that are able to sell shop supplies, then the little nuts and bolts, the gaskets, the pieces of hose, the hose clamps, the little bits of fluid, those things all fall into that job supplies category.
[00:11:51] JeanAnn SaintGrace: For those of you in California and New York, you have to capture those. So we either need to bump up your parts matrix, bump up your labor matrix. We've got to do something, and we've got to itemize almost everything we put on that vehicle. So that's just a New York, California parentheses in the middle of the conversation.
[00:12:11] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So back to 1,050 in parts, labor, shop supplies. So, and we always take out tax when we're talking about average repair orders 'cause that's not your money, right? That is a, a in bucket out bucket. There's no profit on that. So we're always talking before tax At that rate, at one thousand and fifty times four cars, that's forty-two hundred dollars a day.
[00:12:35] JeanAnn SaintGrace: When you multiply that times five, that's a little over twenty thousand dollars. That's four cars a day, two techs, one service advisor, twenty thousand dollar weeks, which turns into a million dollar year. Now, I know we have to take fixed costs into account for all of this, and we've always got to balance that.
[00:12:52] JeanAnn SaintGrace: But for most small shops with this model, they can push to a million very easily doing good DBIs, taking good control of their, their parts pricing and labor pricing, charging appropriately for diag checkout and labor times. That will get you to a million. Now, how do you scale that? At that point, as you add every tech, so if you add a third tech, that's gonna push five hundred thousand in sales.
[00:13:21] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So then you'd be at three techs, one service advisor, um, one point five million and about six cars a day. Okay? So that's the math. So if you wanna scale it, that's how it goes. And probably in this model for two to three techs, two and a half to three techs, you need a service advisor. So if you're gonna jump to five techs, you need two service advisors.
[00:13:44] JeanAnn SaintGrace: If you go to six techs, you can still probably run two, but you gotta figure that out. It depends on your s- advisors and your team. So that's how we scale it. Every technician adds about five hundred thousand to what they can produce, and that's how you scale that business. Now, when you get into a much bigger model, you can afford to fill in with a few more smaller tickets, standalone oil changes, that kind of thing.
[00:14:11] JeanAnn SaintGrace: We're never gonna get away from that. We have to allow for that. So we might need six cars a day. We might need, you know, two to three big jobs and two to three small jobs to have that all even out. We're talking averages. So I'm never... I'm not saying don't do standalone oil changes. We have to do that. But make your oil changes profitable.
[00:14:31] JeanAnn SaintGrace: Add in a tire rotation, add in a, a tire balance, add in wiper blades. You know, catch the air filter, the cabin air filter. Catch those little things that you can do quickly and as part of the service to make it a little more profitable, a little more valuable to the customer. So, so again, we're always talking averages, and we can pick it apart to death, but for this conversation, we gotta kinda, you know, even things out.
[00:14:58] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So we can look at, you know, getting four cars a day, even in a small market Shouldn't be hard to do. If you have exit scheduling to where your service advisors are getting people coming back, we're exit scheduling their oil changes, we're exit scheduling if they don't need brakes today, we can do them next week, then this model becomes very easy to manage.
[00:15:25] JeanAnn SaintGrace: And, you know, I know there's shops out there doing 50, 60, 100 cars a week. They have a different model. But for a smaller shop, these are the numbers that you need to look at because this is gonna change how your business runs. And instead of being run off their feet at the end of every day, your team's gonna have some breathing room.
[00:15:45] JeanAnn SaintGrace: They're not gonna be just hunting for the clock. They're going to be ready to jump and go home and actually feel like they can do something rather than feeling taxed at the end of the day. The additional, like I said, adds to your customer service. We can do better DBIs. We can spend more time with the customers.
[00:16:05] JeanAnn SaintGrace: We can bring them in, chat, chat, chat with them, build the rapport, build that relationship that we're working towards when they, when they drop it off. We can call them, being unhurried. If they don't immediately call us back, we're not dying that they're, they're not calling us back. There's ways to make this work that really improve the morale, the culture, and the ability of your business to run.
[00:16:31] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So I do advocate for this, especially in smaller shops where we're trying to get the ball rolling. If you're a startup shop, I really recommend this model, and I also think that you can scale this into a much bigger shop if that's the model that you wanna run. Um, and this is, this is my experience, and these are the groups of shops that I generally work with.
[00:16:58] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So just to get everybody moving, you know, if, if you're hurting for, for either cars or if you're hurting for sales, if you've got the cars and you're not selling what you need every week, then adding your DBI, improving your average repair order, that's the ticket to get your sales up without adding staff and without adding car- adding cars.
[00:17:21] JeanAnn SaintGrace: And at no point am I advocating that we're taking advantage of the customer. I'm using air quotes when I say that because the average car on the road needs somewhere between $2,500 and $3,000 worth of service, whether it's brakes, whether it's shocks, whether it's s- fluid services, tires, whatever that looks like Most vehicles need the work unless they're under 30,000 miles, right?
[00:17:47] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So, so we're not, we're not taking advantage. We're not treasure hunting as I saw a coaching company put out there. We are not on a treasure hunt. We are here to inform our customers of what their cars need and how much that's going to cost and letting them know when and how we can complete that work.
[00:18:08] JeanAnn SaintGrace: That's what we're doing. We're not doing heavy sales. We're not fear selling. We're not treasure hunting or dig-digging for dollars. We are informing the customer of where their car's at. And I will be honest with you, it was always so good to... It's such a good feeling when you had been sealing a customer for breakdowns and repairs, and then you get them caught up on their pa- their maintenance and their repairs, and then all you're seeing them is for oil changes and tire rotations for a while until that next big service, and then you're doing the service.
[00:18:41] JeanAnn SaintGrace: But they're not having breakdowns. They're taking care of their cars. They're fixing things when you find them broken rather than being broken down on the side of the road. So this is a, this is a, a win for the, your employees and your team It's a win for the shop, and it's a win for the customer. There's no, there's no losers here.
[00:19:01] JeanAnn SaintGrace: This is one of those almost utopian unicorn-like p- plans where everybody wins, and you can build it out this way. You just have to decide that this is what you're gonna do and push towards it. Now, is it going to happen overnight? It can have immediate effects. It can overnight increase your average repair order, which automatically increases sales, then you get back this balance.
[00:19:29] JeanAnn SaintGrace: Do your customers have to get used to it? They do, and that's why I encourage exit scheduling for your oil change customers, because that way, no matter what your schedule looks like, if you're, if you're dialing down your standalone angel... um, oil changes to two to three a day, then they need to plan ahead.
[00:19:47] JeanAnn SaintGrace: And there's always pushback on that. "Well, they don't know how much they're gonna drive. Well, they don't know this. Well, they don't know that." I can guarantee you that on average, your customers' driving habits don't change. They commute the same. They travel the same on the weekend. A big trip might change things, but on average, even the people that are like, "Well, I don't know if I'm gonna have that many miles on it," I can almost guarantee you that they will.
[00:20:13] JeanAnn SaintGrace: Because people are, are creatures of habit. They do the same thing every day. They do it day in and day out, week over week, month over month. It's, it's pretty reliable. They might be a little over, a little under, and we might have some room to, to move them around. But once they get used to this, and once they, they start to see the benefits of the process, everybody's gonna buy in.
[00:20:37] JeanAnn SaintGrace: Your team's gonna buy in, your customers are gonna buy in, and at the end of the week and at the end of the month, your profit and loss is gonna look much better, and your sales is gonna increase, and, and nobody's gonna feel, quote-unquote, the pain, right? We're just doing our jobs in a different way to make everything better for everybody else So again, just like when I talked about productivity, there's a lot of moving parts to this, but the keys are having a good solid, um, labor rate that is where it needs to be, and you should be looking at your labor rate probably on a quarterly to six-month basis to make sure that your fixed costs haven't increased, you haven't given somebody a raise, your insurance hasn't gone up, uh, health insurance, whatever benefits you're offering.
[00:21:27] JeanAnn SaintGrace: If you decided to give one of your techs a raise, then your tech, your tech, your tech load is going to increase. So we need to, we need to be looking at that probably quarterly to every six months. And again, all the way back to talking about a good, nice tight profit and loss and good record keeping and bookkeeping, you should be able to look at your profit and loss and see the percentages and see where have we gone up or where have we gone down, and what do we need to do to fix that.
[00:21:56] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So, so there's, there's... This is building blocks, right? We're building a foundation towards your success. So when we know our tech load, we know our productivity numbers, we know the goal that we wanna hit, then we talk about why are we doing a DVI on every vehicle? Why are we exit scheduling our oil changes?
[00:22:17] JeanAnn SaintGrace: Why are we doing DVIs? Why are we spending extra time with the customer and building that relationship? It's so that when you present them with a $1,200 or a $2,000 bill, they don't wonder if you've been digging for dollars. They know that you've inspected the vehicle, they know that they can trust you, and they know that, that they need to spend that much money.
[00:22:39] JeanAnn SaintGrace: So, so all of these things are the building blocks to get you to the level of sales and income that you wanna have. And then ultimately, we manage your fixed costs, make sure they're nice and tight. You know, there's always gonna be owner shiny things, and I'm willing to... I'm, I'm never judging that, right?
[00:22:58] JeanAnn SaintGrace: If, if you have a, a specific vehicle you wanna drive or you want to have a boat or you wanna have some owner shiny thing and it's gotta pay for it, it's gotta pay for it. We'll figure it out. But, but if we have everything nice and tight and you know these numbers to where week over week or month over month you're looking at them and you can tell when they go up and when they go down, and then you can go back and do your audits on your work orders and, and audits on your DVIs.
[00:23:24] JeanAnn SaintGrace: "Hey, we missed a cooling system service on this vehicle. It's at 30,000 or 50,000 miles or five years old." And that's where the mai- maintenance mindset comes in. So there's all these building blocks to get you to the shop that you want. And if you wanna do high ARO or high car count, low ARO, go for it. Like, I'm not taking that away from you, but make sure you're not driving your team so hard that they fall over, right?
[00:23:55] JeanAnn SaintGrace: Um, you know, I'm a horse person, so you've, you've seen horses break down, is what they call it. You get horses in a race, and they're good in a quarter mile, but they're not good at a half a mile or, or longer races. So if, if over time you need your team to be resilient, healthy, ready to go to work, not overtaxed, not burnout, then looking at lowering your car count and driving your average repair order up is key to all of that So and you also have to remember, we're not a dealership.
[00:24:27] JeanAnn SaintGrace: You're not a dealership. You don't have multiple streams of income. You can't... You don't sell, uh, parts. You don't have a parts sales center. You don't have a repair sales center. You don't have a new car sales center. You don't have a used car sales center. You don't have all these profit centers like a dealer does.
[00:24:45] JeanAnn SaintGrace: You're an independent auto repair shop. We can't do business like a dealer. We have to do business like an independent aftermarket repair shop. And there's beauty to that. There's wonderful things that come from that. And so I encourage you, if, if something in your shop's not working, look at this model.
[00:25:05] JeanAnn SaintGrace: And again, I'm always open to comments, calls. My, my email address is in the show notes. You can always get ahold of me if you have questions about this. If you catch me on Facebook, you can send me a DM. Whatever you wanna do to contact me to reach out if you have questions about this, I'm always here to help you.
[00:25:25] JeanAnn SaintGrace: But the whole point of this is getting you to your shop your way, and I feel like for some smaller shops, actually I'd, I'd argue almost every smaller shop, this is the way to get you to where you wanna go. And without running yourself, without running your team ragged. Okay? So, as always, I have to pay my bills, and the, um, the people who help us pay our bills are, um, Worldpac and Worldpac Training Institute.
[00:25:55] JeanAnn SaintGrace: And with Worldpac, they've got great, great parts quality. They've got good service. They've got availability nationwide, and that is a huge benefit to have them as a partner in your business. With Worldpac Training Institute, you as an owner can get training. Your team can get training. Um, don't forget that they've got those, um, weekly one-hour free trainings for owners and technicians.
[00:26:19] JeanAnn SaintGrace: And then of course they've got the bigger pay-to-play, um, uh, classes that they put on both online and in person. So check out the Worldpac Training Institute's website and see what they have available for training. And don't forget, STX is coming up in... It's right around the corner in August, so it might be a little too late to sign up.
[00:26:38] JeanAnn SaintGrace: But as that, um, happens on a annual or biannual basis, there's great training there. There's, um their trade show, all the things that, that come out of something like that and building community. So thank you to Worldpack and Worldpack Training Institute for their support of the show. I really appreciate them.
[00:26:59] JeanAnn SaintGrace: And thank you to all of you who listen and watch every week. I deeply appreciate you guys. I hope that this is helping your business. If anything I say needs deeper, um, understanding, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. The first call's always on me. So, um, thank you again so much. Go out there, love your people till you're weird, till they're weird, till it's weird.
[00:27:22] JeanAnn SaintGrace: Love the people, your people till it's weird, and, um, go out there and build your shop your way. Don't forget to like and subscribe. But, uh, I will see you all next week on the next episode, and if you have ideas for topics or guests or anything like that, please don't hesitate to send me that feedback as well.
[00:27:41] JeanAnn SaintGrace: Thank you so much for watching and listening, and have a wonderful day